Baby Crap

~ Laura

After sharing the pain with Hertzberg and Franklin in the New Yorker, I turned to the Caitlin Flanagan article to boost the flagging spirits. Flanagan has the parenting/mom beat for the New Yorker and is often amusing.

Flanagan writes about all the crapola being marketing to young parents today. Toilet paper savers, aluminum framed strollers, diaper cans that turns stinky diapers into one long sausage roll. All those most ESSENTIAL items are pushed on unsuspecting young parents armed with a radar gun and the Baby Bargains book.

She mentions that annoying woman who invented the toilet paper saver and was in every newspaper last week. See, all you stay at home moms, look at the millions you could make in your spare time with just a little bit of gumption. Turn off that soap opera and put your thinking caps on! Of course, those articles sent me into a tailspin, because I have accomplished little of my own work in the past couple of months.

Flanagan disappoints by not pushing her article past the recitation of ridiculous products. She never says why parents are eating up those baby wipe warmers and plastic baby tubs that are used for two months and then left by the side of the road for the trash.

Why do you think parents buy this crapola? What do you think is the most ridiculous baby product today? I nominate the stroller that pipes in music for the baby (and, yes, I’m mocking you, Allison).

Published by Laura

17 thoughts on “Baby Crap”

  1. Hey,hey, hey, I never BOUGHT that stroller, you know! And I didn’t buy the famous $700 Bugaboo either, the one that I saw everywhere I went in New York City.
    I thought I was stopping at two kids, so I had given away all my baby crap. Well, I went and had a third, so I had to restock, and I think I got a quarter of the crap I bought for the first one.
    I did get one gift which sounds ridiculous but turned out to be really cool — a mobile with a remote control. It makes sense — you can turn it on without appearing in front of the baby’s face to wind it up, causing the baby to want YOU, not the mobile.
    http://store.babycenter.com/product/nursery/nursery_accessories/mobiles/6363?ccClick=&slot=3&ct=stars&pid=6363&url=%2Fbaby%2Fparentsleep%2Findex&xTopic=parentsleep

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  2. WHAT is a “toilet paper saver”? When my grandma got old and started to fail a bit mentally she started hoarding things. Some relatives helping her pack for move discovered bags and bags of used tissues and toilet paper. Unfortunately they couldn’t just throw the bags away because she’d hidden her good jewelry and other treasures amongst the discarded paper goods.
    That’s what comes to my mind when I see “toilet paper saver”…
    SS

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  3. I thing they’re playing on parental guilt and/or desire for the “best” for their babies/children. There’s a lot of obsession in the media–only slightly less now than when I first had kids–about what entails good parenting. Interestingly, there’s always stuff attached–books, videos, gadgets. I admit to really wanting a video monitor, not so much because I thought it was so much better than simple audio ones, but just because I’m a sucker for gadgets. I also thought it would be cool to see what my kid was doing when he/she was awake and playing happily.

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  4. My problem with baby crap is that our kids have always tended to like the ordinary crap we own more than the special baby crap we get suckered/guilted into buying. Right now, Alison sleeps best with a fan blowing. We tried a variety of cutesy “soothing” baby noisemakers: music, running water, the sound of wind, etc., etc. None of them took. What does she like? Our big living room fan, blowing in the corner of her room. I’m desperate to haul the thing out to the storage closet for the winter, but no, Melissa is convinced she’ll never nap without it.
    Related observation: my mom tells me that the rhythmic clicking and droning sound of our old washing machine was what always put me to sleep. Wish someone would package that.

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  5. I vote for the plug-in gizmo that warms up a package of wipes so your darling baby’s butt doesn’t get shocked by a cold wipe at diapering time. Someone passed one on to me and I never used it but enjoyed scoffing at it so maybe it was worth it.
    I didn’t buy the gear out of guilt but fear. The prospect of taking care of a baby absolutely terrified me and I hoped the gear would make me suddenly know what I was doing. It didn’t, of course. When I had my second I knew all I really needed was LOTS of diapers. And wipes. And a fleece top for the baby bucket (I live in Minnesota).

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  6. Hard to decide what is the stupidest piece of baby stuff. It all looks pretty stupid a mere month or two after you paid full price for it and now it’s no longer used (if it ever was). I guess buying a new crib was stupid, since we were (and still are) co-sleeping. And all the books, most of which were just banal. Or worse (yes I mean you Dr. and Mrs. Sears).

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  7. Heh! I have that stroller!
    Or rather, I have the double version of it and it’s the BEST double stroller ever. Believe me, because I had three all in all, two of which were trashed by Air France and Bucharest side walks respectively. It’s light (with two babies/toddlers in it, weight is a big issue), it folds small, it’s durable, easy to maneuver… it’s small enough to fit through standard doors, it reclines so both kids can nap, big baskets… I love it.
    We never use the music thingie. In fact, I think I promptly lost those little speakers that came with the stroller. We also don’t have any kind of mobile music player that we could hook up.
    The most useless baby gizmo? Hm… I think those high chairs that recline and do all sorts of tricks for you are very superfluous. You either feed your kid or you put it to bed. I mean – the Romans combined the two and look where it got them. 🙂

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  8. I suppose that’s one of the great things about being 12 years older than my youngest sister. Were I ever to have a baby (unlikely at this point in my life), I can’t imagine using most of the gadgets out there. The things I like are better strollers (the flimsy fold-ups had just come out when the kid was born) and baby monitors. The remote mobile sounds pretty cool, too. Diaper bags are better now, too. But otherwise, it seems to me that warm washcloths are still good if you’re home with the kid, and wipes are nice if you’re out. We had diaper service, which still seems a good idea to me if the diaper services would stop using yucky chemicals to make them all nice and white.
    Oh — I really like how far car seats have come, too. I’d go for the volvo of car seats. Otherwise, I see my friends’ kids playing with the the same basic stuff that we played with.
    Oh — Bush is now fumbling his press conference, if anyone’s interested …

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  9. I was just teasing, Allison.
    The toilet paper saver was a device created to prevent a toddler from unrolling it as they like to do. There was an article about the mom who invented it in every major newspaper last week and segments on every morning show. The media likes to point out all the ways that moms could be using their time better. Gets on my nerves sometimes.
    Russell – My sister discovered that her daughter only went to sleep with the white noise of a hairdryer, so she taped an hour of hairdryer sound to get her to sleep. Then she found a $19.99 white noise machine at Walgreens, which works like a charm. My two year old is sleeping right now with that in the backround.
    Not only are there more baby products then every before, but there’s a lot more maternity clothes than every before. In the five years since I had my first, the GAP, Old Navy, H&M, and Target have come out with their own lines of elastic banded pants. I think it has a lot to do with the increasing number of older parents with a lot more disposable income.
    ADM- I’m off to check CNN. Thanks for the update.

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  11. as a part-time nanny i’ve checked out many of the strollers, but i have stroller envy when i see that really cute bugaboo. i want that stroller and i don’t even have any babies to put in it….well, not that yet that is…..

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  12. Ahh…okay, thanks for the link. Asked the 15yo DD and she said she would’ve had just as much fun pulling the TP off one square at a time. Didn’t ask the 3yo DS because this is one fun project that hasn’t yet occurred to him. 🙂 The cats were unwilling to offer an opinion either way.
    Personally, I’d rather deal with a connected strand of unrolled TP than pick up millions of teeny squares. And I may just get my Sanitary Mothering license revoked for this…but, provided the floor isn’t filthy and the kid’s hands not dirty…why not just reroll the stuff and use it?
    SS

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  13. Hey, we’ve been turning diapers into plastic sausages for slightly over five years now (that’s two children, BTW) and have achieved our main goal in that time. No dog has shredded and/or consumed a diaper in our house, despite their strong natural urge to do so.
    As for a toilet paper saver… Is TP really so expensive that you need to save it?

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  14. I think it has a lot to do with the increasing number of older parents with a lot more disposable income. and guilt, guilt, guilt.
    I’m not sure exactly…I started parenthood with a 6 year old and a 4 year old, and I succumed to Flibble Overload for the first 18 months (Flibble = that kid crap/kipple that ends up on the floor, like the teeny pieces from McDonald’s Happy Meals). It is the general 20th century MORE is better.
    Baby monitors are the slickest thing ever, for my money. The house was sufficiently long and narrow and Californian that I could be out of earshot of my kid (but perhaps not the neighbors) so I could put her down, put on the timer for 10 minutes, turn off the monitor, and achieve her fussing herself to sleep without too much wear & tear on the mom. When my dad was in his last illness, the baby monitor technology let him have just enough autonomy. My neighbor’s been recovering from surgery–it’s let her have more help than she might otherwise have had.
    Allison was small for a long time–the industrial strenght baby backpack was more useful to me than a stroller (but I used to hike long distances, might not be as wonderful for somebody else…)
    Oh, the baby wipe warmer thingy? Actually I kept a hotpad on most of the time and put a bunch of stuff on the hotpad. Allison was born in Dec. and if the room was warm enough to change her in, I couldn’t sleep. The hot pad did a lot of service.
    Isn’t it interesting that one person’s ridiculous extravagance (the poopy-diaper-sausage-thingy) is another person’s real problem solver. I am going to have to remember that–I believe it is an unsuspected application of Miller’s Law. “In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true, and try to imagine what it could be true of.”

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